The horror genre in film creates all sorts of perplexing forms of entertainment. Audiences willingly expose themselves to fear and discomfort, which has been a recurring motif for my selected texts. As a horror lover myself, I sometimes find myself asking the question “why do we seek out these horrifying experiences?” After searching for and reading different texts, I realized many of them focused on theories exploring the appeal of horror. One in particular stood out to me and delved deep into the topic. Katerina Bantinaki’s “The Paradox of Horror: Fear as a Positive Emotion” argues about the cognitive approach, which seems to suggest that curiosity and intellectual satisfaction of uncovering the unknown are central. And the emotional approach, which claims that the emotional responses drawn from horror are in fact key to enjoying the genre.
Noël Carroll, as discussed by Katerina Bantinaki, offers a cognitive explanation for the appeal of horror. One recurring motif in horror fiction which was discussed by Noël Carroll and referenced in Bantinaki’s work, is the idea of monsters as beings that lie, “outside our standing conceptual schemes” (Bantinaki, 384). This motif of the “other” (creatures that violate the boundaries of normal human experience) is significant since it connects with a universal cognitive drive to understand the unfamiliar. The horror genre repeatedly presents monsters that challenge our understanding of reality. From the alien in Alien (1979) to the demonic possession in The Exorcist (1973). These creatures embody both fear and fascination while their nature invites an audiences to engage intellectually as well as emotionally. Carroll’s argument highlights the cognitive pleasure of making the “unknown known” by suggesting that the primary draw of horror is found in curiosity. As Bantinaki explains, “the pleasure derived from horror fiction is cognitive” (384). This means that audiences are intrigued by the monster’s existence/behavior and they actively look for resolution through the narrative’s unfolding. The pattern of presenting a monstrous entity and then revealing its nature mirrors the process of scientific discovery where understanding and explanation serve as a reward for enduring the discomfort of the unknown. This recurring narrative structure can be seen across numerous horror texts and reinforces Carroll’s theory: horror is driven by human’s desire for cognitive clarity.
In contrast to Carroll’s cognitive approach, Katerina Bantinaki emphasizes the emotional responses horror provokes in its audiences. She suggests that it is this emotional engagement (not just curiosity) that lies at the heart of the genre’s appeal. A recurring motif in horror films is the intense emotional experience of fear and relief – emotions that fluctuate with the rise and fall of suspenseful sequences. This emotional rollercoaster is central to the audience’s experience since they are not only intellectually engaged but also emotionally invested. Bantinaki argues that “it is doubtful whether audiences indeed derive mostly cognitive and thus dispassionate pleasurable experiences in response to horror fiction” (384). The visceral fear experienced while watching a film like Jaws or Silence of the Lambs cannot be reduced to cognitive process. Instead, the motif of emotional highs and lows plays a crucial role in the horror narrative. The pattern of building fear and releasing it through climactic moments is essential to the genre’s rhythm, which gives the audience a sense of catharsis as they confront and survive the threat alongside the characters.
Works Cited
Bantinaki, Katerina. “The Paradox of Horror: Fear as a Positive Emotion.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 70, no. 4, 2012, pp. 383–92.
fourleafclover, the question of why people like or even engage with horror genre content is one that’s come up a lot around me lately, so this discussion was a great read. I’ve heard both the curiosity and the emotional arguments before—common writing advice for horror stories is not to reveal too much in order to keep the fear and intrigue of the unknown, for example, and why I think I personally like horror is as an interesting emotional or political outlet. I find it interesting that, like you use in your blog post, “catharsis” is a common term used to refer to the emotional and bodily experience of building stress and then releasing it. Originally, this term was used to refer to tragic plays, or other tragedy stories, coming from a Greek root meaning to “cleanse or purge” (as in, cleansing or purging tension or emotion). I talked a lot about catharsis while studying Greek tragedies in a class last year—Aristotle first brought the term into more popular usage in referring to the purpose of tragedy (though, his exact meaning has been up for debate for a long time). Interestingly, “catharsis” also refers to a therapeutic technique coined by a colleague of Sigmund Freud’s. Josef Breuer is considered in some circles as a forerunner of psychoanalysis, and his “cathartic” technique was originally developed to relieve symptoms of hysteria. To be clear, I’m not claiming that Breuer’s work holds up perfectly today or that folks who enjoy horror suffer from hysteria. It’s just an interesting connection that theories of cycles of building and releasing emotional stress or physical tension are prominent in a number of disciplinary contexts. I agree with Bantinaki that emotional engagement and moments of emotional highs and lows are essential to the horror genre’s format, and wonder if she talks about any psychologically-recognized definitions surrounding these cycles? I’ll have to check her article out!
I think that a great read that connects to your question would be Katherine Tullmann’s “Sympathy and Fascination”. It’s a piece about why we feel sympathy for immoral characters in films.
At one point in the text, Tullmann describes this theory called the “distancing approach” which basically says that viewers can sympathize with immoral characters because their world is fictional and seems distant from ours, so they feel freer to pity to sympathize (or root for) evil characters. I think this same idea can be applied to why people like to watch horror: because you’re able to experience a world without any actual consequences to your real life. I think fascination is a natural part of human nature, but I think fiction and especially horror allows us to dive into things that are fascinating to us but we would never actually experience in the real world